About Time Page 2
The word “clock” will be used very loosely throughout About Time. It derives from European words meaning “bell” such as cloche, Glocke and klocka. Today, we tend to use it to mean fixed devices, either electronic or involving intermeshing geared wheels, that keep time and show it to us. I use it to mean far more. Throughout what follows, any human-made device with the purpose of tracking the passage of time is included in my definition of a clock. This includes sundials, hourglasses (sometimes called sandglasses or sand clocks), water clocks, time-finding telescopes, time signals, pocket watches, wristwatches—whatever.
ENOUGH INTRODUCTIONS. LET us begin our odyssey. And to do so we will travel back in time to ancient Rome, over 2,000 years ago, and look at a sundial, fixed to a column at the heart of the Roman Forum. The sundial has long since been lost, but, as you will see, its story is one that could have been written yesterday, such was the modernity of the concerns it raised at the time. Because the people of Rome were not happy with the way this sundial controlled their lives.
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Order
Sundial at the Forum, Rome, 263 BCE
Everyone in Rome remembered the day the sundial came to town. Manius Valerius Maximus, the returning war hero, had stood proudly and imperiously on the elevated rostrum at the heart of the Roman Forum. In front of him were huge, cheering crowds, eager to celebrate their elected consul who had commanded Rome’s military forces to a decisive victory on the island of Sicily. It was Valerius who had captured the city of Catania for the Roman Republic, and it was he who brokered a treaty at Syracuse, the most important strategic alliance in Roman history. The year was 263 BCE, and the taking of Catania an early success in the First Punic War, between the rival states of Carthage and Rome. War booty, plundered from the island, brought the victory tangibly back to the people. Often, that meant the prows of captured enemy ships, hacked off and mounted on columns in public centers like the Forum. But it was not all about military trophies and plundered treasure. One of the objects that Valerius had looted from Catania was modest to look at; even mundane. But it came to change the lives of ordinary Romans—and our own—forever.
Artist’s impression of speakers in Rome’s Forum, published in 1851
Pointing to a spot by the rostrum on which he stood, Valerius revealed the sundial he had brought back from Sicily and mounted on a column that bore his name. It took the form of a large block of marble in which a hemispherical cavity had carefully been chiseled out. At the top of the cavity was a bronze pointer, or gnomon, and lines carved into the marble acted as the time-telling scales onto which the gnomon’s shadow fell. It told the time and calendar of Sicily, slightly different from that of Rome, but it did not really matter. It showed that Rome was on top, and the crowd had gone wild.
Everybody knew that triumphal columns in public spaces like the Forum were symbols of great military power, which meant that Valerius’ public sundial of 263 BCE, which was Rome’s first, was not simply an ornament. As war booty from the sacking of Catania, displayed on its column in the very spot where Rome’s most famous public speeches were made, Valerius’ sundial stood proudly for the military might of the Republic. But this column was destined for higher fame. As the crowd dispersed from the Forum that day, few realized the true significance of what they had just witnessed. It had seemed as if they were celebrating a decisive victory against the Carthaginians by cheering the plundered sundial set up in Valerius’ name. But they soon learned otherwise.
The sundial from Catania was joined by dozens more across Rome, each designed to regulate and control the myriad daily activities of Rome’s citizens—who quickly became uneasy at the intrusion of this new timekeeping technology.
Things eventually got so bad that sundials became a target for the city’s playwrights and critics, who poured scorn on the new devices. Writing a few years after the Forum sundial had first been installed, one exasperated playwright made a character exclaim:
The gods damn that man who first discovered the hours, and—yes—who first set up a sundial here, who’s smashed the day into bits for poor me! You know, when I was a boy, my stomach was the only sundial, by far the best and truest compared to all of these. It used to warn me to eat, wherever—except when there was nothing. But now what there is, isn’t eaten unless the sun says so. In fact town’s so stuffed with sundials that most people crawl along, shrivelled up with hunger.1
A later writer described sundials like the one mounted at the Forum as “hateful” and called for the columns on which they were fixed to be torn down with crowbars.2
But it was too late. Public sundials began to appear across the Republic. Valerius’ own triumphal sundial survived the public outrage for exactly ninety-nine years, only to be replaced in 164 BCE by one that was even more accurate. Five years after that, the hated sundials of Rome were joined by a new public timekeeper at the Forum, a water clock, which kept the time through the night as well as the day. Now the clock ruled the sleeping hours of Romans as well as their waking ones.
We should think of the sundial in the Roman Forum as the city’s first clock tower. Mounted up high, looking over the people, and standing for Rome’s ruling classes themselves, it changed everything. From the moment Valerius revealed his sundial at the Forum, Romans were forced to live their lives by the clock. And this new temporal order was sweeping civilizations across the world.
THE TOWER OF the Winds, in the Greek city of Athens some 650 miles from Rome, is one of the best-preserved buildings from the ancient world. This octagonal marble tower, sited close to a busy marketplace at the foot of the hill of the famous Acropolis, rises forty-two feet into the air and measures twenty-six feet across, and it was an astonishing sight for the people of this crowded and vibrant city. The external walls were covered in brightly colored reliefs and moldings representing the eight winds, with each of the eight walls, and a semi-circular annex, carrying a sundial. Inside, the ceiling was painted a stunning blue color covered with golden stars. At the center of the imposing interior was a water clock, which was fed from a sacred source high up on the hill of the Acropolis called the Clepsydra, a name which became synonymous with all water clocks. The clock is believed once to have driven a complex mechanical model of the heavens themselves, like a planetarium, orrery or armillary sphere.
Nobody is quite sure when the Tower of the Winds was built, but it was probably about 140 BCE. As with the sundial at the Roman Forum, we can think of it as an early public clock tower, giving Athenians the time of day as they went about their daily business at the market and elsewhere, and giving order to their lives. It was also symbolic of a wider order. The gods of the winds, depicted on its decorative panels, were allegories of world order; the stars inside, together with the water clock and its mechanical replica of the heavens, were symbolic of a cosmic order. Certainly, it was an astonishing spectacle.
Tower of the Winds, Athens, photographed in the twentieth century
But, also like the sundial proudly installed by Valerius in Rome, the Tower of the Winds may have carried a further message. If, as some historians believe, the structure was built by Attalos II, king of the Greek city of Pergamon, to commemorate the Athenian defeat of the Persian Navy in 480 BCE, then it could serve as a vivid peacetime reminder of the military strength of the state—and the discipline needed to maintain it.
Even more historically sketchy is the tantalizing possibility that the city of Verona, once part of the Roman Empire but by the year 507 ruled by the Gothic king, Theodoric, contained a tower that housed a huge water clock, set right by the Sun, which not only showed the time but sounded it in an extravaganza of noise. A scholar working in Theodoric’s court explained that “musical instruments sound with strange voices obtained by the violent springing up of waters from beneath,” and it is hard to imagine a more potent expression of the power of the new Goth order in the city.3 Theodoric himself explained the purpose of the clock: to let the people of Verona “distinguish the various hours of the day and thus decide how best to occupy every moment.”4 A sundial on a high tower might be missed or misread. With a monumental acoustic clock tower calling out the hours just outside Verona’s city walls, time, and the order it implied, could not be ignored.
IN EMPIRES AROUND the world, the sight and sound of time from high towers had begun to organize the lives of the people, and project a message of power and order. Long before Verona’s acoustic clock tower was built, towers carrying drums or bells loomed large over imperial Chinese towns and cities, often centered on marketplaces. The second-century Chinese scholar Cai Yong explained, “When the night clepsydra runs out, the drum is beaten and people get up. When the day clepsydra runs out, the bell is struck and people go to rest.”5 A third-century description of the tower built over the marketplace at the ancient city of Luoyang read, “A drum was hung in the building. When it sounded, the market was closed. There was also a bell. When it was struck, the sound was heard within fifty Chinese miles.”6
Over 1,000 years later, in the late thirteenth century, when the Venetian merchant Marco Polo visited Kublai Khan’s capital city of Dadu (in today’s Beijing), he found two towers standing tall over the city center. One tower contained drums, the other a bell, and all were sounded every evening to mark the start of a strict curfew as measured by a water clock. Anyone caught on the streets after the curfew sounded would be arrested and beaten by troops patrolling the city through the night on horseback. Across imperial Japan, too, from at least the eighth century onward, each major city, whether a capital such as Nara or Kyoto, or a more distant outpost, had its clepsydra and a tall tower from which time was sounded to the public, as well as raising the alarm when the population was in danger from fire or attack. Clock towers were part of the ordering infrastructure of cities.
IT IS TEMPTING, in the twenty-first century, to feel that we are the first generation to resent being governed by the clock as we go about our daily lives; that we are no longer in control of what we do and when we do it because we must follow the clock’s orders. During our long warehouse shifts, sitting at our factory workstations, or enduring seemingly never-ending meetings at the office, we might grumble that the morning is dragging on, but we cannot eat because the clock has not yet got around to lunchtime. But these feelings are nothing new. In fact, while the public sundial was new to Romans in 263 BCE, it had been in widespread use long before that in other cities around the world; the first water clocks date back even further than sundials, more than 3,500 years to ancient Babylon and Egypt.
Public time has been on the march for thousands of years. It is easy to think that public clocks are an inevitable feature of our lives. But by looking more closely at their history, we can understand better what they used to mean—and why they were built in the first place. Because wherever we are, as far back as we care to look, we can find that monumental timekeepers mounted high up on towers or public buildings have been put there to keep us in order, in a world of violent disorder.
THE BEST WAY to reach the ancient Italian canal-city of Chioggia is by fast motorboat, which is how I arrived, with a group of clock specialists, on a wet February morning in 2018. This island enclave, sitting in the Lagoon of Venice fifteen miles south of its better-known sibling, thrived for centuries on its salt and fishing industries and as a commercial port, and today tourists join the fishers around the city’s docks. Even on a cold and blustery winter’s day, Chioggia radiates a picturesque beauty, and it can be hard to imagine the city as a medieval technological crucible.
Our destination that morning was the bell tower of St. Andrew’s Church, on the main Corso del Popolo piazza running through the heart of the historical old city, and our guides for the day were Marisa Addomine, an engineer and clock historian, and her husband, Daniele Pons. What we had come to see was a mechanical device that had first been set running more than 600 years previously, and our excitement could barely be contained. The object we were about to visit, housed high up in the tower, is the oldest mechanical clock in the world.
The residents and government of Chioggia are rightfully proud of their horological heritage. We were met off our motorboat on the harbor front by the city’s mayor and the council’s head of culture for an official welcome ceremony, before heading to the local primary school, where the students performed for us a lavish musical pageant based on the history of the clock in the nearby tower. It is a big part of their local identity, and it is easy to see why. When Chioggia’s historic clock was set going, in early 1386, mechanical clocks, comprising intermeshing gear wheels driven by falling weights, had been in existence only for about a century. None older than the clock at Chioggia are known to have survived, though another clock dated to 1386 exists in Salisbury Cathedral in the UK. This is a remarkable enough claim to fame in any case, but there is a sense of local rivalries in this enclave city, too. As Addomine has remarked, “For centuries the Cinderella of the Lagoon, Chioggia now can show something that Venice does not have: a medieval clock.”7
But Chioggia’s claim to technological fame does not rest solely with this clock. The city had also been home to two of the world’s most celebrated medieval clockmakers: Jacopo de Dondi, who constructed a remarkable astronomical clock in nearby Padua, installed in 1344, and his son Giovanni de Dondi, born in Chioggia, whose clockwork planetarium, finished in 1364, has thrilled scholars and collectors ever since. Perhaps Giovanni had a hand in the construction of the clock now in the Chioggia bell tower; or, more likely, he and his father had helped build a culture of clockmaking in the city which made it a magnet for mechanical innovators keen to show off the latest technology to the public.
The mechanism of the clock itself, housed in a small room near the top of the bell tower, is imposing but not especially grand. It stands about a yard and a half high, a set of wheels, pinions, barrels and levers all held within an iron frame that is painted red. Rods lead to the hands on the public dial outside, high up on the tower; the clock’s bell is struck by hammers pulled by wires. But it was not built as a church clock, calling the faithful to prayer. It arrived at St. Andrew’s only in 1822 after it had spent more than four centuries as the public clock mounted on a tower of Chioggia’s city hall that used to stand a couple of hundred yards down the Corso del Popolo, before its nineteenth-century demolition.
In the early 1380s, Chioggia, once a great and prosperous city, had been utterly devastated. First, the Black Death pandemic had reached the city in the spring of 1348 and spread quickly, killing half the population and shattering Chioggia’s economy and trading networks. Then, in 1379, a grueling, centuries-long conflict for economic supremacy between the rival maritime republics of Genoa and Venice erupted into months of bloody warfare in Chioggia, ending in 1380 only after the death of some 3,600 of Chioggia’s population, and ruin for the lagoon city.
An eyewitness described the aftermath of just one battle, a fight that had reached the piazza near the city hall: “there was great destruction . . . the Piazza was stained red with the quantity of blood of so many Christians, killed in a grievous and cruel massacre.”8 Hundreds of bodies lay dead in the street on that one day alone, killed by fire and sword; months of further fighting and siege followed. Supplies were cut off and some residents resorted to eating dogs, cats and even rats to survive. Chioggia’s war cast a long shadow over the city and, as it lay in ruins, the task facing its government was the reconstruction of a once-thriving economy and the restoration of Chioggia’s status as one of Europe’s great cities.
What makes the installation of a public clock on the city hall in 1386 so remarkable is that it took place amid huge cutbacks in public spending in the aftermath of the war. Staffing levels at the city hall, which incorporated the city council offices, court and jail, were slashed almost by half, with the loss of crucial posts, including medics, legal staff and trading-standards inspectors. All the money saved went directly toward the rebuilding of the devastated city center and its infrastructure, from sea defenses, forts and mills to salt beds, housing and the lime kilns needed to support large-scale construction. It might therefore seem odd, given the austerity of spending in the city, that on February 26, 1386, Chioggia’s council gathered in the main chamber of the city hall to record the completion of work on the clock, approve the final payment to the clockmaker, Pietro Boça, and agree to pay him a salary of five pounds per month for its ongoing maintenance.
We do not know whether the clock was brand-new or secondhand, or even whether the payment to Boça was for a major refurbishment of a damaged existing clock. What we do know is that getting a working public clock on the tower of Chioggia’s city hall, overlooking the main piazza, was considered so important that it was worthy of great expense, just six years after the war had ended. In the midst of so much devastation, with the local economy on its knees, the horrors of a brutal occupation a painful recent memory, and the effects of the Black Death pandemic still being felt in every family across the city, what would a clock bring to Chioggia’s city center, as it was rebuilt, phoenix-like, from ruin?